A Delicate Balance Tested

A full appreciation of Lynn Shelton’s new-age comedy, “Touchy Feely,” depends on your knowledge of reiki. In this gentle holistic therapy that originated in Japan, a practitioner moves healing energy through the body using touch or passing the hands above the body. Although I have tried reiki, I can’t personally attest to major psychological or spiritual benefits. But it certainly didn’t hurt. What you take away from it may depend on the faith you invest in it.

In “Touchy Feely,” the transformations undergone by characters, with or without reiki, are abrupt and mystifying. The movie is a detour into the ozone for Ms. Shelton, whose hardheaded, sharply written satires “Humpday” and “Your Sister’s Sister” explore the booby traps in intimate relationships. But where the sensibility of her earlier movies is solidly grounded in psychological reality, “Touchy Feely,” whose title conveys an undertone of sarcasm, wobbles into uncharted psychic territory. Its humor is softer and more ambiguous than that of Ms. Shelton’s earlier films, and its characters are harder to pin down.

The two main characters, Abby (Rosemarie DeWitt), a massage therapist, and her older brother, Paul (Josh Pais), a dentist, live in Seattle. Both go through mysterious, mystical transformations. Abby, who regularly visits her friend Bronwyn (the always wonderful Allison Janney) for reiki sessions, suddenly develops a revulsion to human touch that coincides with pressure from her longtime boyfriend, Jesse (Scoot McNairy), who owns a bike shop, for them to move in together. She is so aghast to find herself repelled by physical contact that she suspends her practice.

Paul, a plodding, laconic milquetoast whose dental practice is failing, acquires mysterious healing powers. Rumors of his gift quickly spread, and, before long, his office is overflowing with clients, many bearing gifts of gratitude. His singular talent is for curing patients with the chronic jaw pain known as TMJ. Paul’s dental assistant is his daughter, Jenny (a relatively subdued Ellen Page), who is itching to emerge from under her father’s shadow. Jenny also has a serious unrequited crush on Jesse.

If “Touchy Feely,” like Ms. Shelton’s last two films, focuses on a small circle of friends and family members, there is a greater distance separating characters who don’t seem to be genetically related. The dialogue lacks Ms. Shelton’s customary bravado, in which her semi-hipsters traverse social boundaries. “Touchy Feely” uses images to convey feelings that her earlier films would have expressed in words. Close-ups of skin, as imagined by Abby after she is seized by her phobia, seem intended to illustrate her revulsion. But the images are quite beautiful, like microscopic contour maps of alien territory.

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The Times critic Stephen Holden reviews "Touchy Feely."

The story seems to be headed somewhere until Bronwyn suggests that Abby tackle her problem by taking MDMA, a k a ecstasy. At this point, “Touchy Feely” becomes disoriented and doesn’t recover its direction.

The most compelling moment is a musical interlude in which Jenny and Paul attend a performance by Tomo Nakayama, the lead singer of the Seattle band Grand Hallway. Delivered by Mr. Nakayama in a plaintive cry as he accompanies himself on guitar, his ballad “Horses” distills the inchoate longings of these likable characters more effectively than any spoken words. “Is it a blessing or a curse to be found?” the lyrics wonder. “Is it a burden or a gift to be bound?”

This transfixing moment suggests that Ms. Shelton is searching for a direction out of the mumblecore cul-de-sac that served her so well in the past.